Second Laws,Two Cultures,and the Emergence of an Ecosystem Aesthetics

Abstract

The appropriation of scientific concepts by the humanities and the visual arts exemplifies what many feel are both the pitfalls and possibilities of interdisciplinary engagement. The principle of entropy, which C. P. Snow claimed could serve as a litmus test of the ‘two cultures’ divide, provides an excellent starting point for exploring how artists have employed scientific concepts far beyond their original contexts. As a case study in interdisciplinarity, the use of entropy in the visual arts is also a lens to consider the evolution of an artistic proposal from the 1960s known as ‘system aesthetics’. As an early challenge to the clean demarcation of art and science, system aesthetics was a precedent for what might be described as the emergence of an ecosystem aesthetics within contemporary art and design today.     

From Batticaloa via Basel to Berlin. Transimperial Science in Ceylon and Beyond around 1900

ABSTRACT

Recent historiographies of ‘Science and Empire’ have successfully critiqued older euro-centric narratives. They highlighted how science was ‘co-produced’ through interactions between knowledgeable European and non-European actors in colonial ‘contact zones’, and how this ‘pidginised knowledge’ circulated through networks across various sites within the British Empire. This article shares and expands this approach. By focussing on continental European scholars in Ceylon around 1900, it argues that scientific networks were never confined to a particular empire. Science among Europeans was, rather, multi-lingual, mostly cross-disciplinary and always transimperial. Applying such an approach to the history of science in late colonial Ceylon allows us to uncover entanglements between historical processes that have for too long remained subject matters of disconnected historiographies: the emergence of Buddhist revivalism, evolutionary theories about human origins, the transformation from ‘liberal race science’ to Nazi eugenics in Germany, and the surfacing of British cultural anthropology.     

Whose cultural value? Representation,power and creative industries

ABSTRACT

The debate around ‘cultural value’ has become increasingly central to policy debates on arts and creative industries policy over the past ten years and has mostly focused on the articulation and measurement of ‘economic value’, at the expense of other forms of value—cultural, social, aesthetic. This paper’s goal is to counter this prevalent over-simplification by focusing on the mechanisms through which ‘value’ is either allocated or denied to cultural forms and practices by certain groups in particular social contexts. We know that different social groups enjoy different access to the power to bestow value and legitimise aesthetic and cultural practices; yet, questions of power, of symbolic violence and misrecognition rarely have any prominence in cultural policy discourse. This article thus makes a distinctive contribution to creative industry scholarship by tackling this neglected question head on: it calls for a commitment to addressing cultural policy’s blind spot over power and misrecognition, and for what McGuigan (2006: 138) refers to as ‘critique in the public interest’. To achieve this, the article discusses findings of an AHRC-funded project that considered questions of cultural value, power, media representation and misrecognition in relation to a participatory arts project involving the Gypsy and Traveller community in Lincolnshire, England.     

Cultural democracy: an ecological and capabilities approach

ABSTRACT

In recent years, there has been sustained critique of the conceptual and normative foundations of UK cultural policy – the paternalism of ‘excellence and access’ and the neoliberal logic of ‘creative industries’. Whilst these critiques are well established, there is little work offering alternative foundations. This paper makes a contribution to this task. It does so in three ways. Firstly, by identifying ‘cultural democracy’ as a key discourse offering a counter-formulation of what the aims of cultural policy could and should be, and analysing uses of this term, it highlights the need to more effectively conceptualize cultural opportunity. Secondly, drawing on research with one UK-based initiative, Get Creative, the paper identifies a particularly consequential aspect of cultural opportunity: its ecological nature. Thirdly, it shows that the capabilities approach to human development provides ideas with the potential to help build new conceptual and normative foundations for cultural policy. Proposing a distinctive account of cultural democracy characterized by systemic support for cultural capabilities, the paper concludes by indicating the implications this may have for research, policy and practice.     

Gustav Metzger: iconoclasm and interdisciplinarity

ABSTRACT

Gustav Metzger (1926–2017) has been described as ‘the conscience of the art world’ for the consistently political content of his art and his commitment to political activism on the subject of nuclear weapons, capitalism and environmentalism. Metzger’s artistic output from the late 1950s onwards reflects a theory of art as both aesthetic form and social action and identifies him as a key precursor of activist art. This article considers the inherent interdisciplinarity of Metzger’s practice as it evolved during this early period between the late 1950s and early 1970s in relation to his agenda of social engagement.     

Engaging with place: artists,site-specificity and the Hebden Bridge Sculpture Trail

This paper traces the creative processes employed by artists participating in the 2004 Hebden Bridge Sculpture Trail and examines relationships between place, art and site-specificity. The Trail is a popular, temporary annual local arts event that invites international artists, students and community art groups to create and exhibit site-sensitive sculpture within Hardcastle Crags in Yorkshire, England. We consider some of the multiple ways in which artists mediate relationships between ‘site’ and artwork. We connect geographical concepts of place that highlight location, locale and sense of place, with mobile understandings of site as porous and flowing. The paper positions geographical research of art, opening out art and site in a non-urban environment through comparative discussion of concepts of ‘place’ and three ‘paradigms’ in site-specific art (phenomenological, social/institutional and discursive, Kwon 2002 Kwon, M. 2002. One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity, Cambridge MA: MIT Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). Three elements of site-specificity – histories, natures, interactions – are then explored through fourteen artists' creative practices and our documentation of the installation of their artwork in the Trail. We highlight the juxtaposition of ‘sites’ within the Trail, the over-lapping of ‘paradigms’ within individual artworks, and transitory aspects of ‘site’ to suggest that ‘time’ holds great significance in understanding site-specificity, place and art outdoors.     

Seeds: Contracting the Audience in a Play about Science

Abstract

In pursuing the question ‘what can scientists learn from theatre?’ Particularly, ‘what can scientists, as scientists, learn from theatre?’ this paper argues that science lacks a normative framework that theatre is capable of providing. Despite science’s well-earned epistemic reputation, there is adequate reason to question its ethical reputation, particularly at the point where cutting edge scientific technology impacts society. I consider science as operating in four categories: the scientific method; the scientific hypothesis; the scientific experiment; and the scientist’s personal character. The realms of the scientist’s hypothesis and personal character are those where social pressures are reciprocally exerted, where imaginative play mentality and epistemic values are most in evidence. Theatre can examine these realms effectively because it is able to use narratives that appeal not only to logical and social moral judgements but to emotional and visceral responses, so as to situate science in the social context in which the pressures of law, funding, experimentation, society, and personal ambition converge in ‘the game of life’.

This can be seen in the theatrical process known as ‘contracting with the audience’. I point out a spectrum of traditional narrative tropes by which science makes “contracts with” audiences. The paper draws on theories of entrainment and theatrical game-play from Peter Stromberg and Philippe Gaulier, as well as my own practice and research into the process of contracting with the audience, to propose how to reach beyond tradition and to shift normalising contracts “outside the box”. To illustrate my proposition, I examine the play Seeds by Annabel Soutar as directed by Chris Abraham for Crow’s Theatre and Theatre Porte Parole. Seeds follows the controversial court battles of Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser against agricultural-biotech corporation Monsanto, which sued him for patent infringement of its Genetically Modified Organism Roundup Ready Canola. Seeds helps its audience define a public arena for discourse even as it brings to our attention the factors that make this difficult to do, while making an excellent contribution to the genre of ‘Documentary Theatre’. It is a successful contract with the audience that creates a public forum for discussion about contemporary ethical debates in science, thereby merging artistic ambiguity and scientific theory.     

Trench art between memory and oblivion: a report from Poland (and Syria)

ABSTRACT

This paper summarises some of the results of archaeological research on twentieth century military heritage in the Polish woodlands, namely the discovery of artefacts made, remade, and personalised by soldiers, prisoners of war, and civilians during military conflicts. Such objects are examples of so-called ‘trench art’. I draw attention to the universality of trench art, a phenomenon that is usually associated with the past conflicts such as the Napoleonic Wars and the First and Second World Wars. Nonetheless, trench art is, in its complexity, diversity and affectivity, an integral part of modern warfare, including the recent tragic conflict in Syria. After presenting the project and some examples of trench art documented during the research, I discuss a unique artistic intervention entitled Painting on Death to illustrate the affective, aesthetic, and political value of modern trench art.     

‘We don't do dots ‐ ours is lines’ — Asserting a Barkindji Style

ABSTRACT This paper offers an ethnographic exploration of the assertion of a ‘Barkindji style’ art: why this matters and to whom it matters. Focusing particularly on the Darling River area of Wilcannia and on the period from the 1980s to the present, the increasing interest in art‐making by local Aboriginal people is considered. Through a dialogue with artists, artworks, and others, the work examines the changing form, design and content of art and the role of art in defining ideas of Barkindji Aboriginal culture and tradition. Invocations by key cultural brokers to produce work that is seen to ‘belong to us’ is explored in terms of the cultural, political, and personal work that this involves; particularly as this intersects with ideas of artistic freedoms versus artistic direction by cultural brokers. The paper discusses the personal considerations and tensions that come to bear in the processes connected with production of art and its making. In so doing, this paper engages with, and extends, the work of Tacon et al. (2003), Cooper (1994), Kleinert (1994) and Morphy (2001) as this pertains to art ‘styles’ and material culture from what is widely referred to as south‐eastern Australia.     

Cool nothing: Dom Sylvester Houédard’s coexistentialist concrete poetics

ABSTRACT

This article concerns the concrete poetics of Dom Sylvester Houédard, which I define using a term from his 1963 article ‘Concrete Poetry & Ian Hamilton Finlay’, ‘coexistentialist’. Houédard's concrete poetry has sometimes been criticized for an anachronistic avant-garde quality, because of its non-semantic use of written language, and its associated air of intermedia experiment. But the term ‘coexistentialist’ has various connotations which allow us to interpret Houédard's work as highly responsive to its cultural moment, and to the unique theological tradition from which it emerged. These connotations include: the relationship between early and mid-twentieth-century modern art and literature; existentialist philosophy, especially the writing of Jean-Paul Sartre; Marshall McLuhan's theories on modern communication and ecumenical dialogue within the Catholic Church during the Second Vatican Council. After presenting an outline of Houédard's poetics related to these themes, I analyse some of his concrete poems or ‘typestracts’, produced between 1967 and 1972.     

Photius and Poetry

Abstract

‘No art or science, except poetry, was foreign to this universal scholar’. Thus Edward Gibbon. It has long been notorious that poets are excluded from the Bibliotheca. Why? The question persists. Hence the present paper.     

Tom Stoppard’s Big Picture: The Chaos that is Our World

Abstract

Issues arising from discussions regarding the ‘two cultures’ of science and art are many and varied. Tom Stoppard’s very active utilization of science in many of his plays has resulted in his work — especially the quantum mechanics-informed Hapgood and the chaotics-informed Arcadia — being held up as paradigmatic of one science/art position or another. Often, critical approaches to these plays involve a checklist of scientific facts, implying that the goal of such art is to serve as a delivery device for scientific breakthroughs. While plays, novels, and movies of various sorts may have such goals in mind, Stoppard’s plays do not comfortably fill that agenda, critical arguments to the contrary notwithstanding. Neither do Stoppard’s plays show particular interest in engaging any debate about the superiority of one ‘culture’ over the other. In his two ‘science plays’ in particular, what Stoppard offers is an enrichment of both science and art through metaphorical intertwinings that suggest experience is best served when both camps collaborate. The bigger picture that results argues an overlap in epistemology, namely revealing the uncanny similarity in which artist and scientist approach the material that is our universe.     

Taking Direction: New Dramaturgies of Science from the Splice Symposium and the Performing Science Conference

Abstract

This short article responds to two recent conferences on performance and science: the Splice Symposium (Chimera Network/University of Notre Dame) and Performing Science (University of Lincoln). Rather than a conventional conference report, the author reflects on a selection of presentations in the light of issue one of ISR’s ‘theatre and science’ series.     

Resistance politics of non-violence: Jean Paulhan’s ’Fautrier the Enraged’ (1943)

ABSTRACT

The idea of adequately ‘representing’ violence was an important point of discussion amongst Resistance artists and intellectuals at the time of the French Occupation. In particular, intellectual resistant Jean Paulhan had written on the subject in his text introducing Jean Fautrier’s retrospective exhibition of November and December 1943 in occupied Paris, ‘Fautrier the Enraged’. While the thematic of the exhibition proposed an academic and traditional subject matter, Paulhan demonstrated that Fautrier’s typically matierist and anti-naturalistic approach was instrumental in ‘suggesting reality’. Fautrier’s individual creative process, Paulhan argued, led to a transparent experience to be shared between viewer and artist not only on an aesthetic level, but also from a political point of view. At the time of ‘Fautrier the Enraged”s writing, Paulhan had indeed been concerned with issues of political engagement, as is evident from his essay ‘The Flowers of Tarbes or Terror in Literature’ (1941), which reflects upon the human condition and is concerned with reconciling poetry, politics and ethics. The author believes that such questions were being addressed in Paulhan’s text on Fautrier and by Fautrier’s art and that an aesthetic reading of Paulhan’s text is inseparable from a political interpretation of Fautrier’s art within the context of the Occupation. Indeed, the aesthetic criteria used in Paulhan’s text as framework to his argument were then loaded with political meaning. For instance, Paulhan considered virtuosity as an essential artistic characteristic to be opposed to the art of imitation based on the technical ability to observe and simulate ‘nature’ as imposed by the occupants. With excerpts from Paulhan’s essay and exchange of letters with Fautrier as well as visual analysis of some of the artworks presented in the exhibition, this paper deals with the wider issues of ‘representation’ in the historical and cultural context of the Second World War in France.     

From universal homogeneity to essential heterogeneity: On the visual construction of “the Lappish race”

During the second half of the nineteenth century, a radical change took place in the representation of the Saami. Whereas physical variation earlier was insignificant to cultural representation, from then on it became the very essence of their otherness. In this paper I relate the change in the representation of the Saami to the emergence of a modern discourse in which the concept of ‘race’ became central to the organization of knowledge and social practices as well as to the understanding of cultural difference. Moreover, I try to demonstrate how the “success” of the racial discourse was conditioned by new visual technologies.     

Order and organisation

Abstract

In this paper we re-examine the relationship and possibilities for discourse between the academic disciplines called ‘sciences’ and those known as ‘arts’. Do they represent one culture or two? An apparent diversity of views emerges in two contemporary writers, George Steiner and Nicholas Lash, the former differentiating the two, the latter insisting that the ‘two cultures’ debate itself is misconstrued. We follow the principal threads of both arguments in the light of an intimate involvement with the practice of science and its communication in public and academic contexts. Visiting aspects of both arts and sciences that distinguish them from other disciplines, the role of theory, and the twin purposes of function and contemplation, we find that much of the pain of discourse between them arises from a failure to recognise common structures and functions. As a result, either function or contemplation may be overemphasised at the expense of the other. We suggest directions in which the tensions might be resolved in both public and academic arenas.     

Ambition and temporal sovereignty in recent Scottish cultural policy

ABSTRACT

This paper is a study of the figure of ‘ambition’ in Scottish cultural policy since about 2010. The argument of the paper is established through the development of the concept of ‘temporal sovereignty’. Through ‘ambition’ cultural policy attempts to subject culture and cultural agents to the formation of the Scottish government’s temporal regime, and in particular the relation between creative industries and the effects of economic temporality. The study examines the temporal properties of ‘partnerships’ as a key strategic mechanism in that project. The focus of the study is an analysis of authoritative Scottish cultural policy texts which show that the subject of culture becomes the organisation of temporal sovereignty. The paper explains the conditions for the emergence of the problem of ‘temporal sovereignty’ and discusses its consequences for structures of rule and logics of cultural policy formation. It concludes by indicating the location of culture in a politics of temporalities.     

The Unhelpful Notion of ‘Renaissance man’

The current journalistic use of the term ‘Renaissance man’ to describe someone whose work straddles boundaries between today's specialisms is a hindrance to understanding almost any aspect of the culture of the Renaissance — a culture within which both ‘art’ and ‘science’ had meanings different from those they have now, the most significant intellectual division being between the learned and the practical traditions. We look first at the learned tradition of the universities (where teaching was in Latin). The people considered include William Harvey, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Nicolaus Copernicus, Regiomontanus and (very briefly) Isaac Newton. Within the practical tradition, centred on workshops, we consider the state shipyards in Venice (where Galileo claimed to have learned much), workshop practices in general and the emergence of the notion of ‘Fine Arts’. The individuals considered include Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti and Raphael, as well as the famous clockmaker Jost Bürgi (who taught Kepler about algebra). We conclude by considering the transfer of skills between these two traditions. There are several areas of overlap, but here we concentrate attention on the story of algebra. Algebra was invented by al-Khwarizmi (whose name gives us the term ‘algorithm’) in the ninth century, within learned mathematics, in Baghdad. In the West, elementary algebra, derived from al-Khwarizmi's work but in the simplified form of problems, became part of ‘practical mathematics’. Slowly, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, developed forms of algebra crossed over into the learned tradition. This is as much a matter of crossing social barriers as of crossing intellectual ones. Eventually, the practical tradition as a whole became absorbed as an elementary part of the learned one.     

Discourse analysis and non-representational theories in heritage studies: a non-reductionist take on their compatibility

ABSTRACT

In the last ten years or so, we have witnessed a shift towards so-called non-representational theories in heritage studies. In non-representational theories, one is interested in cognition, affect, and emotion, as well as textual or visual representations of heritage. This turn can be viewed as a prolongation of the popular approach of analysing heritage as discourse, in which heritage is viewed as a cultural process from which the objects of heritage evolve. However, this paper will demonstrate that some proponents of non-representational theories seem to have overlooked an already established linguistic tradition of analysing affect and emotion ‘in’ texts. Since human affect and emotion are linked with semiotic meaning-making, I argue that it is futile to attempt to separate discourse analysis and non-representational theories. I forward an argument that Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Critical Realism (CR) as a philosophy of science may serve as platforms where non-representational and representational approaches can meet to more fully grasp how we represent and respond to heritage.     

Aims and contradictions of cultural diversity policies in the arts: a case study of the Rich Mix Centre in East London

In recent years, the concept of diversity has become prominent in cultural policy, echoing community arts philosophies of the 1960s and 1970s that questioned the notion of universal artistic value and argued for greater recognition of the relationship between cultural identity and inequality. Cultural diversity policies today implicitly challenge the liberal‐humanist discourse of ‘the best’, and emphasise what is ‘relevant’ to particular communities. Official policy rhetoric can often hide contradictions that are only apparent in practice. How does ‘diversity’ shape the way organisations engage with audiences and does this contradict the still present discourse of ‘universalism’, with its emphasis on value judgements? This paper explores this tension through the study of Rich Mix, a multi‐functional arts centre in London's multi‐ethnic East End. It argues that Rich Mix is caught between discourses of universalism and diversity, leading to confusion over the project's rationale and ambivalence amongst artists about how their art is judged.